FILE – In this Jan. 15, 2018 file photo, U.S. Marines stand guard during the change of command ceremony at Task Force Southwest military field in Shorab military camp of Helmand province, Afghanistan. The Pentagon is developing plans to withdraw up to half of the 14,000 American troops serving in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Thursday, Dec. 20, 2018, marking a sharp change in the Trump administration’s policy aimed at forcing the Taliban to the peace table after more than 17 years of war. (AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini, File)

Amid all the political chaos, invective, and division of the moment, Americans should not lose sight of a remarkable and historic fact. The government, the elite, and ordinary people are all at their most antiwar in generations — perhaps since the 1930s. This is, on balance, a very good thing.

Knee jerk unwillingness to fight is not an asset for any country, but today’s mood is much more prudent and responsive to practical realities. There is a broad and durable consensus that America’s big military endeavors over the past twenty years did not deliver sufficient results, and in some cases were closer to catastrophe than folly.

Leading politicians of all stripes are firm doves — from Donald Trump and Rand Paul on the right to Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard on the left.

The open secret of Trump’s success in moving the Beltway opinion on China is that trade wars upset many but shooting wars with China and North Korea upset more. Trump has only received pressure to hawk up on Iran and Venezuela; in both cases he has shied away, and his opponents have not gone after him for it. America has learned a costly lesson.

At a deeper level, however, even stronger insights are taking hold. The awareness is setting in that today’s technology is breaking down the global order regardless of ideology or principles. The tech explosion created new problems of governance for countries large and small, and they are responding by asserting sovereignty in new ways. The World Wide Web is becoming a series of Nation Wide Webs, with Russia, China, India, and the U.K. setting the tempo. Even Americans are increasingly convinced that global free speech is more of a threat than a benefit to the United States.

The result of this changing dynamic of perception is that, conceptually, defense is becoming more important than offense. New technologies that created chaotic offensive capabilities are giving rise to a hunger for commensurate defensive capabilities — ones that forestall and deflect war, rather than encourage it with a tit for tat military buildup. New companies are focusing on surveillance, border enforcement, and personal or community protection.

Values wise, the shift shows that America’s recent crusading impulses are decidedly on the wane. While citizens still largely agree one way or the other that the US is special and unique, they no longer see the country as the agent of moral history in the world, with all the duties of initiative and risk that entails. The goal is to maintain cohesion and survive the realignment.

Clearly, while salutary, today’s new understanding of conflict and America’s role cuts against the severe increase in political rage and ill will at home. Initially paradoxical, the key is that spiking defense imperatives retrieve fundamental questions about who we are and what America is that must be preserved.

On the left, the answer to this question has been moved by an increasingly uncontrollable radical vanguard into the future: America today is unjust to its core, polluted with white supremacy, white nationalism, or simply the biological and spectral evil of whiteness. Only the America to come will be just; politics today demands revolutionary destruction of the white-ist regime. Of course far from all Democrats believe this, but many suspect it is the dark truth, and resistance to the concept is very disorganized.

On the right, by contrast, the entire complex of issues surrounding the identity of America is met with radically different responses. No one faction prevails over elite or public opinion in its view of the degree to which the America to be saved is located in the past, present, future, or some Burkean synthesis of the interests of the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. Compounding the problem, these debates play out with very little awareness that technology now (and characteristically) exerts a greater shaping influence on attitudes and events than principles and propaganda.

Historically, when the US has knotted up like this over core questions of identity and preservation, the release and reset has come through war itself — and only once through genuine civil war. The primary strategic threat arising from otherwise beneficial dovishness is not the rise abroad of existential threats, which tend to develop independently, but the domestic spread of a generalized desire for a final civil conflict. This appetite can manifest either in explosive violence or in a potentially endless cycle of grinding enmity.

In both cases the result would be a dramatically weakened America unable to meet the new defensive obligations imposed by the new technological age surrounding the planet. The collapse of the US as the “best house in a bad neighborhood” would send shock waves through the already crumbling international system. Some enterprising Americans might feel liberated to pursue their fortune around the world, but many rightly fear that a weak America would deprive them of their best shelter and strongest opportunity for advancement.

Most Americans are not thinking this systematically about the state of the union and where it may lead. But most are still patriotic and have little appetite for genuine internecine conflict.

Wars of words are one thing; civil strife is much different — more demanding, more costly, more uncertain, and more risky. At the same time, however, America’s big peace moment feels like a marshaling of energy for the hard work of re-founding the country around a sense of justice that can hold us together in an unprecedented age.

James Poulos is a member of the Southern California News Group’s editorial board.

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